Dear Pre-2005 self, what the hell did you do with your time without YouTube!? If YouTube didn’t exist then Portable TV wouldn’t exist; our days would be more prouductive, Rebecca Black would just be a wannabe teen, we wouldn’t know a cat named Maru, we couldn’t cheer ourselves up watching The Simpsons highlights and our lives would probably be infintely more productive.

But take heed, not everything on The Tube is junk and pure novelty; film makers thrive and careers are launched through YouTube, and maybe yours will too: for the first time ever, YouTube is hosting an online film festival aptly titled Your Festival.

Anybody can enter Your Festival and try their hand at snagging the tantalizing cash prize of $500,000 and the opportunity to create a new work produced by Ridley Scott. Holy Mother Of Scorsese!

The guidelines for submission are slim—”It can be any format – short film, web-series episode, TV pilot – and any genre”—and the entry fee won’t cost you a dime, so there really isn’t any excuse not to enter, you budding young auteurs. Take a look here for more information about how to enter, and if you need some more advice/just want to look at his pretty face, watch Michael Fassbender (a juror for the festival) give out his unsolicited, but most welcome opinions about filmmaking. Entries close 31 March 2012.

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